Hisham Matar

Credit: Diana Matar

Hisham Matar

Hisham Matar was born in New York City to Libyan parents, spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo, and has lived most of his life in London. He is the author of the novels In the Country of Men, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Anatomy of a Disappearance, and the memoirs The Return, which received a Pulitzer Prize in 2017, and A Month in Siena. His most recent novel, My Friends, was longlisted for the Booker Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award. It won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives in New York and London.

cover of the book I Found Myself

I Found Myself

Fiction by Naguib Mahfouz

Translated from Arabic by Hisham Matar

With a contribution by Diana Matar

In his final years, the Egyptian master storyteller and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz drew on his dreams, combining the mystery of what we experience in the night with the deep wells of his narrative art. These last dreams, stunning poetic vignettes—now brought beautifully into English for the first time by the acclaimed writer Hisham Matar—appear here with dreamlike photographs by the famous American photographer Diana Matar, which both mysteriously rhyme with Mahfouz’s nocturnal reveries and, allowing the reader a chance to dream in turn, opening up the texts. These sketches and stories are tersely haunting miniatures. Recurring female characters may embody Cairo herself, especially one much-missed lover from Mahfouz’s youth. Friends, family, rulers of Egypt, and many beautiful women all float through these affecting, brief tales dreamed by a mind too fertile ever to rest, even in slumber. A tender, personal introduction by Hisham Matar, recollecting how he and his wife met Mahfouz in Cairo not long after the assassination attempt on the author, is moving and likewise indelible.

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